When I was a much younger man, my father told me that casual conversation is built on topics like the weather and sports, but that I should avoid topics like politics and religion, since those topics are too deep and too controversial. You are likely to rouse passions if you engage in those topics, he told me. That seemed like good advice.
My father also told me how to watch the news when I was young. He told me that I should be able to know about all the things they covered on the news. This involved knowing a little bit about politics, a little about economics, and a little bit about current events, a little bit about the weather, a little about sports. That, too, seemed like good advice.
I am long past getting my news from television. I get my news from Google News and I weigh the importance of stories on my own. I still follow my father’s advice; however, I have added more areas of interest based on my having grown in a different direction than the mainstream news which, since the advent of Limbaugh, has become far too partisan to be a good provider of objective news.
Here is how I think of the news.
Sports and Weather
My education prepared me unequally for the task of watching the news. Knowing something about the weather is not all that hard. Knowing about sports requires me to keep track of several teams. Neither of these particularly difficult. That is probably why most of the conversations I have in public are about the weather and sports. They are easy and uncontroversial.
Current Events
I’ve given up on current events at the local level. The local news dedicates itself to murders and old ladies who get burned up in their apartments or who die and are not found for six months, and horrifying medical news (‘up next, are your children at risk for these common flesh-eating viruses?’). Such stories are intended to gain viewers through their fear that they (or their children) could be subject to the sways of fortune, despite the patent unlikelihood that such things will happen to any individual, which are equivalent of winning the lottery or the (more likely) chance that they will be hit by lightning.
They are not always true, or if they are true, they usually have a half-life, so that one month we are supposed to avoid caffeine and the next month it turns out that coffee is good for us (in moderation). Ditto alcohol and cholesterol. My wife and I were wondering the other day when the new ‘superfoods’ that we are supposed to eat will cause us to develop ‘face cancer.’
I determined long ago that the local news was more interested in raising viewership by raising passion than they were in actually offering a balanced picture of the world we live in. When I was a Boy Scout, I was told to ‘be prepared,’ but that was because I was adventuring in the world. I needed to be prepared, but I also had to weigh the likelihood that the satellite I was laying in the peaceful grass watching pass overhead would suddenly turn from its steady orbit and crash into me (as happened to Skylab while I was a Boy Scout in 1979). Sure, it could happen, but I determined that such an occurrence was (extremely) unlikely, and I decided not to worry about it.
In contrast to my reasonable and measured view of events by which I conduct my life, the news would have me too terrified to leave the house (which is convenient, because it leaves more time for watching the news and getting more paranoid). I stopped watching the local news altogether over 15 years ago.
Politics
I was prepared to think about politics even before the push to reduce all human behavior to political motivations that I encountered in graduate school. Watergate and the 1960s had raised the consciousness of reporters to their own role in the political environment. They clung to their increasingly partisan view of the role of young people like Joni Mitchell who had discovered what her (and their) elders had not.
This shift away from a balanced view of ‘what is happening’ to partisan politics was taken advantage of by Rush Limbaugh, who finally put an end to any notion of nonpartisanship in the news after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.
I prefer not to engage in politics at all after having had such a terrible experience in grad school where I had to avoid taking solid political positions, though I could not avoid be perceived by others as having taken the political position of ‘them.’ I learned through my experience in grad school that politics is a dead end.
Now, I can imagine that many of my readers will ask me ‘How can I say that there is no political motivation to human action?’ to which I would reply ‘I didn’t say that. How can you reduce all behavior to political motivation? I defy you to tell me what my political motivations are.’ You will have to rely of your assumptions about the world and my position in it, because I will continue to tell you that I am more interested in art and aesthetics than I am in politics, which I will tell you quite frankly I find extremely limiting. Politics involves reaching the end of inquiry before reaching the end of the problem you have set for yourself. The way that politics closes the circle is to end debate with others who disagree with you. That sort of thing is not for me.
I don’t believe that the news was ever as partisan as Limbaugh says it now is, nor as unpartisan as Walter Cronkite says it used to be.
Economics
The one area where I wish I’d had more of an education was in the area of economics. By the lack of integration of economics into a general education curriculum, I believe we can see the limits of the general education curriculum. Gen Ed is usually based on the humanist construction that emerged in the Renaissance.
The emergence of that school involved several factors. The first was the disintegration of confidence in the stability of language and reason to penetrate beyond the scope of itself to peer into Heaven. The second was a revitalization of the humanist constructions most notably found in Cicero’s ‘studia humanistica.’
According to this article, the ‘studia humanistica ‘ referred
to poetry and those subjects that have affinities with it, namely grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history—a list which is linked both etymologically and in substance to the modern concept of the humanities. In Renaissance Latin the term humanista designated one who taught these five subjects, in Latin and often in Greek, and it is on this term that the meaning of the word ‘humanism’, in its Renaissance sense, is based. Petrarch’s and the humanists’ preference for these subjects also implied a rejection of those associated with Aristotelian Scholasticism: logic, physics, and metaphysics.
This was derived from a latent idealism that made the pursuit of money evil, while the pursuit of physics and logic were nothing more than dead ends. Metaphysics, however, was saved (particularly after the Enlightenment’s attempt to define all sciences according to the principles derived from Descartes). Poetry was transferred from the limited point of view described by Petrarch to the unlimited point of view that could open up the closed universe once again.
Recently (especially since 1960), this opening up of closed logic through symbol has come under attack. Derrida has applied deconstruction to constructed texts and has shown that deconstruction is the only way to maintain the metaphysical orientation of art.
But this leaves out the science of economics out of the mix. According to the metaphysical principles that I was taught in school, economics serves in the construction of unequal relationships which are out of whack with the dream of nature as the well that holds all in equality. We, as human beings, have gotten out of step with nature, having built up property boundaries and then enshrining them in law, thus securing the distance of our social code from the propriety of nature.
In such a universe, business is run by specialists who don’t know their true selves but are living in an artificial universe propped up through artificial means. Corporations are even words. They are legal ‘fictions’ that grant them the same standing before the law as individuals, despite the fact that they have far more power and resources than any individual (except the super rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) ever could.
Because of this, our obligation as educators is to deconstruct property rights in order to get back to our original natural oneness with the universe in which no one has more than another.
My Pareto Universe
I don’t think this construction of the universe is correct. Look at it this way. America is an exceptional nation insofar as we have made good choices with our resources. Russia has an qual amount of resources, but they made (and continue to make) poor choices with their use of resources. They still operate on the principle that income should be distributed equally; and yet, when corporations were privatized and people were given slips of scrip for ownership of formerly state-owned companies in equal parts, some people didn’t understand capitalism and sold their share, while others bought. This brought great wealth on the risk-takers who chose well—for not all scrip paid off equally well and not all who bought were paid off with equal wealth—and kept most of the sellers in poverty. This is an instance of Pareto inequality.
But my point is that by continuing to sideline economics, which relies on choosing which of many options to take in a competitive natural environment, in order to maintain ‘natural’ order. I maintain that such an order is the product of fiction itself (see my discussion of ‘Rousseau’s Debt to Ovid’ in his construction of his universe here).
In a Pareto universe, America has won over people who have relied on lesser forms of government. This has always been the case. Once, Hammurabi had the most advanced code of government, but anyone who wants to set up a city state around a ziggurat in the modern day is welcome to try it; but I suspect nobody would because society and social theories of social organization have progressed.
And this is why America won the Cold War. It is not that we had found the best system ever conceived; it is that we had found the best system conceived so far in history. It is no accident that the United Nations charter begins with “We the Peoples,” the same language that graces the Preamble to the United States Constitution. We have won (for now). In a Pareto universe, losers follow winners or get left behind.
This is the message of the 1998 book, The Commanding Heights : The Battle for the World Economy
After Sachs’ plan was implemented, inflation fell from 20,000% per year to 11%, though according to critics, left the country worse off than before due to a rise in unemployment, a fall in industrial output, and a fall in per capita GDP. (Wikipedia)
Because of the shocks brought about by ‘shock therapy,’ the ‘native’ (not my term) people of Bolivia elected one of their own, the ‘native’ Evo Morales. Evo may be a great guy, but he’s running the Bolivian government inefficiently in a world in which the United States, which has mastered the Pareto universe better than any other nation of earth, exists; and so they are losing out on the benefits of a better (but by no means perfect) organizational system. That system is in no way ‘natural’; it must be learned.
And make no mistake: I do not judge America to be a great place because we have the most advanced capitalist market in the world. I foresee serious problems with income disparity that results from capitalism’s ability to provide a flood of resources to those who take risks. But my point is that my liberal friends like Evo Morales and Michael Moore, whose universe is based on righting the ‘natural’ inequality through the use of redistribution of wealth, are fools if they think that people will use those resources more efficiently than those who made correct (and often very hard) choices after a process of trial and error. Such as system trades the products of and often hard-won education for the ‘natural’ ease of having resources come to you unbidden.
Causes of Ignoring What ‘Them’ Know for What ‘Us’ Know
In a Pareto universe, not all economic solutions are equal. Making poor choices will result in your country falling behind in the race for limited resources for which nations are fighting. But, whether on the left or on the right, people who decide to stop looking at the universe and trying to make their efforts last forever will always be making a mistake. Always. The constructed universe changes, and with change come new ideas for grappling with new wrinkles. By this we drive ourselves forward in an effort to keep up. This is not natural at all. It comes from knowing that even if we quit, our neighbors will still be competing for resources.
Look at the position of America in 2011 versus its position in 1957. In 1957, we had more jobs, largely because we working in a non-competitive environment. The Europeans had had their cities destroyed by war. The Soviets were experimenting with a natural state of equality. In 2011, our jobs have been shipped overseas by corporations who find cheaper labor in a world of competition.
But educators have held on too long to the 1960s idealism which says that money is bad, m’kay, and needs to be excluded from consideration in the fullness of humanity. Therefore, the humanities departments that I have worked in have remained committed to purifying the world of those who have been devoted to the pursuit of selfish wealth. It is in the university environment, with its long view of the past and its detailed knowledge of the subtleties of Plato and Aristotle and their philosophical successors, that we get the class of people that I see on C-Span who sit quietly in their slightly-disheveled-but-still-nice suits taking notes on the subtleties of past so they can so that they can manage the (apparently inevitable) decline of Western civilization.
But to my mind, such a historical process of looking at the past for a vision of the future shares the problem of ancient Rome’s reliance on Livy’s flowing report of the past as a guide to the future and not on , say, a realistic set of expectations (see here for my discussion of this process in full).
What [Livy’s assumptions about the past] involved is a claim that it is both desirable and possible to erect a future upon the basis of an idealized past. Such a claim is, however, utterly unrealistic. In the first place it ignores the truth that history does not repeat itself; that ever-changing situations constitute a perpetual challenge to the ingenuity and endurance of mankind. In the second, it presupposes that men are in fact at liberty to choose between perfectly arbitrary and abstract alternatives of ‘vice’ ‘and virtue’; in other words, that there is nothing to prevent them, should they so desire, from living the life of their own grandfathers, the ‘valiant men of old’. But this presupposition is wholly fallacious; since it implies that human beings stand in no essential or intrinsic relationship to social reality which, in point of fact, they themselves actually constitute. These effects are not accidental. On the contrary, they are the direct and inevitable outcome of a logic which, by ignoring this relationship, grossly misconceived nature of the ‘law’ operator in human society. The logic in question is, of course, that of classical idealism. (91-92)
Game theory, not the idealistic politics of Plato and Aristotle, gives us tools for thinking about our future in competitive world. Von Neumann and Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame) are more important than reading Kant, Hegel, or Marx to position a limited rational human being (or their culture) in the world.
The Artists’ Response
This has not been the artists’ response to the failure of the 60s idealism. Instead of accepting that the 60s were not as complete as we once thought they were, they have circled their wagons, erecting (false) barriers between themselves and those on the outside (‘us’ versus ‘them). ‘Us’ are holding on to what André says (completely without irony) is the ‘the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished.’ ‘Them’ who remain on the outside are so foolish that they cannot even see what is so clear to ‘us.’ There is no possibility that they could be wrong.
My Post-Artistic Response to the News
The scientific view of the world would be to weigh our assumptions about the world against what the world is actually telling us about its composition and direction and to change our assumptions accordingly. In the 1960s, I think it was liberating to be using drugs; in the teens of the next millennium, we have (or should have) learned more about the negative consequences of drug use. When circumstances change, we change.
This means that I cannot watch the news the same way as I watched it in the 1960s, where they said (and I believed) that they were presenting me with ‘objective’ news. Limbaugh has pointed out just how much bias there was in the news media, and now I can’t look at a news program the same way again. So here’s how I look at the news today.
I divide the news into news about the past, present, and future.
Present
The easiest things to look at in the present as still Sports and Weather, so I have have a Sports headline feed on my page (though not a Weather headline, since they don’t offer one; I have the Weather Channel feed on my sidebar instead).
In my desire to understand the present world I live in, I look at the news of the world, the news of the U.S., the news from China, and the news from Illinois, the state where I currently reside. This makes a lot of sense, since positioning myself within the world has to do with the state of the world.
Past
But to be honest with you, focusing on the present alone does not get me anywhere on its own. I need to educate myself about the past, as well. This is the product of my education. And this is why I have on my personal news page some of my deepest interests: History, Art Knowledge News, Archaeology, and English language.
These subjects are not exhaustive, but Google only allows me so many areas on my customized page, and I want to leave room for my thought about the future. Of these subjects, English language surprises me, because I was raised to think about English as a conspectiscope of the past, present, and future. It was the reason I always (or at least from the time I was 17) had no other thought than to major in English. But in Google News, I find stories that are focused on the past alone and how we should feel as text messaging is destroying the once secure English language with bastardizations like OMG, LOL, and <3. English Language news feed is extremely conservative, but I love it nevertheless, having studied it for 12 years in school and for 15 years after.
Art Knowledge is the most disappointing to me by far. I was raised to believe that art could show us our future, but when I look at the Google News feed, I find that Art is concerned with erecting artificial barriers of all sorts. Art is better than logic; art is emotional; it is the way we as human beings can get back to ‘nature.’ So ‘us’ within the art world exclude ‘them’ who don’t buy into the art world’s notion of the future. (I’ve talked about this recently and at length in the section on “Science and Limits of Art in My Work”, so I won’t do over it again here).
I can look at art all day, and the reason I do not have a weekly section on ‘What I Am Looking At This Week’ is that I don’t want to burden you with my thoughts about the past only. Music will help me tell the story about the limits of mind in relationship to the past just as well as an art feature can. Unlike music, which continues to thrive in spite of some distribution challenges that have come acout in the age of digital downloading, art has been shrinking in its purview in the face increasing pressure from new ideas in order to preserve its status as holders of the metaphysical truth that has been the standard since the discovery of ‘emotion’ in the face of Enlightenment ‘reason.’ See my consideration of the ‘art’ of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger here. Is it art? Yes. Does it tell me anything about the world except that the world is corrupt and that I should leave it alone and go to a perfect place that stands outside of time, an imaginative world that exists only in the mind of a few, select individuals? No.
And that is the problem I have with art. Art is supposed to be inclusive of all, not just a select few of ‘us.’ It is not so, however. It is limited (and becoming more so) and yet on account of its metaphysical status, the art world cannot admit that it is limited in any way without forgoing its status as unlimited. My art work is an attempt to reconfigure art to take advantage of all the things that must be left out of a work of art in order to maintain its status as metaphysically perfect. This involves putting limits on art with the resulting liberation of art from its too-narrow bounds of an increasingly shrinking ‘us’ to open art up to an increasingly growing population of ‘them.’
The thing that art is lacking—on account of its historicism, combined with a revolutionary posture that wishes to tear down tyrants in order to build government back of the ‘natural manure’ on the basis that art imitates (or should) nature rather than acknowledging the gains we have made, shedding our losses, and moving on from there—is its lack of ideas for the future.
Future
In my reading of the news for the future, I reserve the Science and Technology section, as well as a sections on Mathematics and Statistics (Statistics is a little disappointing, and I’m thinking of switching to another source ). I also look at Business, Economy – World Emerging Markets, and Finance sections (again, I would have more, but Google limits my choices). Business has to look forward; because, as Bill Gates knows, in business resting on your past accomplishments will serve no purpose if someone else comes along with a better mousetrap.
The Insufficiency of the Artistic Response to the Future
My academic colleagues have peered deeper into the past than most have, and insofar as they have I applaud them; but insofar as they have shut out logic (on account of the limitations first noticed during the attempt of the Enlightenment attempts to subsume art and literature to a rational framework) and business (too bourgeois) from the methodological conspectiscope available to them. In doing so, they have weakened the case that art is for all of us and not just the shrinking few of ‘us’ who are still naïve enough to believe what we were told in our own naïve youth.
Oh well, live and learn.